The use of industrial methods and plants for the production of an industrial product, in particular an aeronautical component or system, is widely known.
These methods and plants typically involve a plurality of operating stations, each of which is suited to perform, on an aeronautical component or system, a production activity, which can be a step to process, transform or assemble the component or system.
Though, said industrial methods and plants according to the prior art have some drawbacks.
One drawback consists in the fact that, especially in the aeronautical field, the operating stations and the production activities associated therewith are generally numerous and complex to be managed, in terms of handling, during a working process. As a matter of fact, the articles to be subject to processing are bulky and therefore difficult to move and deal with during their transportation through the operating stations of a production line. Generally, this aspect requires the operating stations to be arranged at a single level or working surface and the industrial products to be moved through the different operating stations by means of overhead cranes and/or slings.
Therefore, in order to perform the production method, in particular in the aeronautical field, there has to be a processing area that requires a free space extending, as a whole, in a horizontal direction; this condition leads to the drawback of necessarily having at one's disposal large industrial areas for the installation of the plants.
Secondly, the use of overhead cranes and slings often leads to difficulties in securing the plant. This drawback, in particular, is relative to the safety of those operators that manually handle the industrial products when they have to be fixed on the overhead cranes or slings.
According to the prior art, JP 62 063053 A describes a crane, which supports a vertically mobile lifting surface and it is suited to receive a semifinished product, a robotized apparatus being activated by a human operator standing on the lifting surface itself. The semifinished product is delivered to a numerical control tool machine by means of the robotized apparatus, so that said semifinished product is subject to processing. Subsequently, at the end of the processing step, the semifinished product is removed from the numerical control tool machine by means of the robotized apparatus. In this way, the operations are performed in a sequential manner and, therefore, the finished product is obtained at the end of the production cycle.
Nevertheless, the technical solution suggested by JP 62 063053 A requires the presence of a human operator on the lifting surface in order to act on the robotized apparatus, thus requiring a manual command or activation for the movement of the moving system associated with the semifinished product itself.